Email

Add your support inbox to Gorgias

If you're like most internet companies, a significant portion of communication with your clients is via Email. Email is so huge it has about 4 billion users world wide. Gorgias recognizes that and has a first class integration with major email providers such as Gmail or Office365. This article will show you how to setup your existing email provider so your email it arrives in Gorgias.

How to setup Email Forwarding

In order for you to respond to email in Gorgias you have to setup what we call Email Forwarding. Just as the name suggests, it forwards all the email from your current email inbox (Ex: support@acme.com) to the Gorgias inbox creating a copy of that email. When you respond to that email in Gorgias it is then sent using our email servers to the customer.

Improve email deliverability using SPF and DKIM

Note: If you're using our Gmail Integration then you don't need to follow this part of the guide since Gmail does it for you.

If you have some customers complain that they didn't receive your email or that it arrived in their Spam/Junk folder then you're in the right place. Even if nobody complained and you're just setting your account up it's a good idea to follow it anyway.

First to understand why those emails arrive in the Spam folder we need to look at how we send emails with Gorgias. Suppose you added an Email Integration and your address is: support@acme.com and you want to send an email to customer@gmail.com.

What happens when you click Send in Gorgias (in simple terms) is this:

We contact the Gmail Email servers and tell them that we want to send an email to customer@gmail.com.

Gmail says: fine that email address exists on our servers, from whom is the email?

Our servers say From: support@acme.com

Gmail: Ok but how do I know that you have the right to send emails from support@acme.com - what if you're a spammer, eh?

To answer that last question we have to somehow prove that we're allowed to send email on behalf of acme.com email addresses. That is where SPF (Sender Policy Framework) comes in. SPF is a simple mechanism that uses a DNS record on your domain to answer that exact question. Which is to say that the IP addresses of gorgias.io servers are allowed to send email on behalf of acme.com.

SPF Setup

In order to setup SPF you have to be able to change the DNS records of your domain. The process of setting up an SPF DNS TXT record is different for different domain registrars and we cannot possibly cover them all, but here are some instructions for a few major ones: